I was told by a cool dozen of my Online Rap Friends™ that I should check out the new Lil Uzi Vert LP. An admirably bold stance to take, considering how fucking stupid you sound simply saying his name. I was told this wasn’t exactly a great album, but it was very “interesting.” That word, it kept coming up. Yet although I feel personally wronged, by all of you, I must concede it’s vague enough to be factual: this is a very interesting album.
The music, of course, is trash. Lil Uzi Vert has always been at the emo-rap forefront of fetal alcohol collateral damage, trying desperately to communicate a feeling, a vibe. Raised by television sets and handheld screens, they don’t even know that humankind already has a rich heritage of shared technology to communicate feelings, one older than any nation on earth, older than history itself. It’s called songwriting. That doesn’t happen much here.
When the dirt dog god Russell Tyrone Jones was freestyling first-take impressionist art, he was channeling actual genius, not to mention riding the waves of Led Zeppelin amounts of intoxicants. Lil Uzi Vert? He’s just kind of trying things out. If you’re reading this: great job. You should keep experimenting. In private, for at least a decade, before you burden us with anything else.
What’s interesting, then, is how any of this happened at all. Even coming from the post-Generation X wasteland of feral 80’s Babies, we were still very much shaped by Our Parents Music, still fluent in decades of worth of eras, genres and fads. There were certain standards. There is a lineage from Pink Floyd to Radiohead, from Prince to D’Angelo, from Detroit house to eurotechno trash. Decades later, it would appear that eurotechno trash somehow won the war, flattening all that culture into an endless loop of major key EDM trap garbage playing in every gas station convenience store in America. Verily, all of these people must die.
The great thing about multiple generations of brain-damaged consumers is, you can sell them anything. The downside of that is, anyone can sell them anything, so in the past two decades the megacorporations who control entertainment have been having a hard time. Despite all their pretensions of data-driven decision making, it’s mighty hard to miss the fact most of their products are failures.
Part of that is because the music business was created by organized crime to launder money. Part of that is because their “data” is mostly their own bullshit numbers. Anyone who thinks 4Batz or Chance the Rappers happen organically is retarded — not in some cruel, pejorative sense, but as an objective medical diagnosis.
An oral history accounting of how all this goofy horseshit was “written,” tracked & recorded would be very interesting, too. Thanks to Rick Rubin and Young Guru, being a recording engineer can seem like a glamorous gig until you make the mistake of actually getting involved. Those poor bastards suffer, and suffer mightily. I pray that everyone involved with this was a fan, but I also know better.
The most awkward thing about the industry is how much you all have to lie about each other, to pretend that a Taylor Swift is somehow operating at the same level as a Lana Del Ray, or that Beyonce Knowles-Carter can muster the vision or depth of Erykah Badu-3000. Constant, “the floor is lava” style delusional word games. It wears you down. The drugs don’t help, but neither does going sober. You join the Illuminati, you cash out with enough money for your llama farm, or you die, young & dumb.
To me, one of the most fascinating thought experiments is “Imposter Syndrome.” I struggle to imagine what it would be like, how it would feel to doubt myself. In this, me and Lil Uzi Vert are blood brothers, the same glorious species of stupid. Past that, I hear only the stress fractures of a small engine being pushed past all limits, seconds away from that eternal sunshine. Everyone who enabled that inevitable death has sinned before God, but I hope I’m wrong; I hope that he lives to be a wealthy old gremlin freak, like Flava Flav.
Gillian Welch nailed it: “People often ask me to talk about my songs. Whatever I have to say about the song, kinda made it into the song.” Lil Uzi Vert is a pathological extrovert who loves making music and has nothing, nothing at all, to say. Zero Dickies.
